iPhone and Mobile Telecom in the Pacific Rim

Apple’s App Store inspires mockery and envy… Start the photocopiers

Fortune Apple 2.0 editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt has written an excellent post on the explosive growth of Apple’s App Store. His post includes several charts and graphs to illustrate the stratospheric trajectory of app downloads and breaks them down into meaningful app categories. This post also takes a deserved shot at Gizmodo’s mock pie chart and points out that “useful” apps available via the app store are just a bit north of the 1% shown on Gizmodo’s pie. Read the Apple 2.0 post on the App Store … worth the click > HERE

Gizmodo’s aim may be to make fun of Apple’s success, yet 500 million downloads in a few short months is nothing to laugh at. China’s wireless carriers aren’t laughing. Instead, they’re giving marching orders to their engineers and web-development teams. As we have noted on iPhonAsia in several posts, China’s major mobile carriers would like to control as much the value added services platform as possible, and they’ve made no secret about their intent to build their own versions of Apple’s App Store. China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou quotes from Macau GSMA conference in November 2008:

Apple was “very, very successful” not only with the iPhone, but also with the application downloads from the Apple App Store.

“We have [non-]disclosure agreements with Apple, so I can’t disclose many details. All I can say is that China is still interested in [bringing the] iPhone into China Mobile markets.”

When reporters pressed China Mobile’s CEO further, Wang Jianzhou revealed that he isan admirer of Apple’s App Store. He also stated that China Mobile would be developing their own App Store. More> HERE

If the Apple App Store is excluded on any “official” (future launches) iPhones in China, the grey market for the current iPhone 3G will remain robust. The current model iPhone 3G will work on China Mobile’s 2.5G EDGE network and will also work on China Unicom’s under-construction W-CDMA 3G network.

More on China’s wireless carriers possible plans for an official iPhone in China > HERE